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Where are the Unborn on Your Justice Scale?

If President Obama is re-elected his pent up rage from having been resisted by so many, and from having had to comply with annoying perfunctory American campaigns and elections that prevented him from ruling full-bore and unconstrained, will express itself in an immediate catharsis of anger against the Church, the unborn, and those who fight for them.

EDMOND, OKLAHOMA (Catholic Online) - Respect Life Sunday, sandwiched in between the many weekend appeals for the poor, for Catholic Charities, for the missions and for Catholic University, we now get to concentrate, for one Sunday at least, all of a sudden and almost startlingly, on the whole question of how we will ever get back to being a civilization again, at least one worthy of the word.

But don't worry; it only lasts for a day.

Get back to being a civilization?

But aren't we civilized already?

Aren't we the greatest civilization, in fact, that has ever existed? Well, in a word, no, no we're not. Because we haven't figured out a way to stop slaughtering 5,000 babies a day in our alleged "civilization."

We really show no signs of getting even close to figuring out how to do this. You would think, given how defenseless and innocent unborn human beings are - how very pitiable really -- that there would be just an enormous outpouring of human empathy and support for their cause.

But there isn't, and instead of finding the cause of the unborn an easy sell we find it to be the hardest sell of all really, a kind of "mission impossible" were it not for the hope that flows from God's grace, and the insistent idea that the Lord of Life does indeed hear the cry of the poor - the real poor that is, those slaughtered before they ever saw the light of day.

But hear this cry He does, and then He carefully notes who closes his ears to that cry.

Today those are the inconsistent ones crying out for "social justice," all the while finding dozens of ways to rationalize their despise of the unborn, and these are the most barbaric of all in this post-civilization. For they have made fetuses of all different kinds of causes, whether it be illness, material poverty, and all those pseudo-justice causes that altogether psychologically serve to mitigate guilt, and to compensate them for the reprehensible crime of having abandoned the most pitiable and defenseless among us, so that they don't have to think about them.

They have displayed the most impervious capacity for looking away from atrocities, and just as they looked the other way, so Our Lord will look the other way when they, confronted with eternal Justice, seek an advocate before the Father (cf. Mt. 10: 32-33).

There are really two very important reasons we still have the abortion scourge among us like some Macbethian residue defying effort after effort, legislative or otherwise.

The first is that one cannot eradicate threats one isn't prepared to fully face, and is well illustrated by a movie I once saw entitled "Memories of the Camps."

It depicts the allied soldiers discovering the death camps at the end of WWII, and the soldiers' anger at the horrors they saw there.

But angry as they were, their anger was nothing next to that of the "civilized," well-dressed inconsistent ones from the surrounding German villages, brought in by the soldiers so as to be forced to witness what their "looking the other way" had long enabled, and so as to be forced -- as a punishment -- to help clean up the bodies and the devastation for which they were, in large part, responsible.

Screaming at the top of their lungs and gesticulating wildly, they were really angry not so much at the Nazi atrocities committed, but rather at the fact that they were being forced to acknowledge those atrocities and this, rather than the Nazi atrocities themselves, was the unpardonable sin earning the soldiers their wrath.

Some noteworthy German citizens had resisted Hitler, but unfortunately far too few. Many explained away the troubling signs of the genocide saying things like "but Hitler is dong so much for the economy," and "he's building our infrastructure and our highway system so we can recover from our national shame."

How can we rationalize voting for candidates who support abortion, when in reality it is quite the same thing depicted by the movie?

Would it have been permissible to vote for Hitler, perhaps justifying the vote by alleging that all the new highways and better infrastructure would make holocausts rarer, because a booming economy would obviate the need for social and economic scapegoats?

The second reason we cannot exorcize abortion from our post-civilization is lust.

Our society has in the contraceptive era separated sex from babies, and sent us relentlessly down the road of ceaselessly objectifying women.

The power behind this revolution really is the contraception.

We no longer look at women as our trusted helpmates (if we are married), or as our beloved sisters (if we are single).

This "pornographication" of women, seducing as it is the great majority of men in our western culture, means we no longer see reality with clear vision when it comes to sex.

Men are robbed of their ability to truly love women, and women, who would rather die in many cases than face being considered unworthy of being loved, turn to what appears the next best option - the total destruction and the blotting from all memory of their unlovability - -the unborn "accident."

Depersonalization is "a crime worse than death" -- is that not how women describe it?

But, thanks to abortion-on-demand, a woman can avoid facing the rage of her own brutal depersonalization by turning to the conveniently available, depersonalizable fetus, and that, at least, just as in the death camps, keeps the brutality hidden from view. This tells us the formula for re-civilizing ourselves.

We "need" abortion to suppress the otherwise unavoidable wrath of contraceptively scorned women, and when their moment of true and authentic re-dignification happens through a return to chastity, we will finally end abortion.

If President Obama is re-elected his pent up rage from having been resisted by so many, and from having had to comply with annoying perfunctory American campaigns and elections that prevented him from ruling full-bore and unconstrained, will express itself in an immediate catharsis of anger against the Church, the unborn, and those who fight for them.

Not waiting even one full week, we will probably see executive orders forcing the Church to pay unqualifiedly for abortion on demand, and not just contraception.

And friends and relatives will go to jail.

And all exceptions and exemptions will be removed immediately, since they were only for the sake of political pacification and now no longer are needed.

If there is anything good in this, it will be that, like the social justice hypocrites of old, those of our own day may finally be confronted with the enormity of their own barbarity, and have a chance to finally pursue a real kind of social justice towards the unborn whom they unsocially, and unjustly, had ignored. -----Dominic M. Pedulla MD, FACC, CNFPMC, ABVM, ACPh is the President of the Edith Stein Foundation, a Social Science Researcher, and an Interventional Cardiologist